Monolith of dreams

You wake up feeling clearer-headed for the first time in a few months, setting a resolve to avoid repeating the past few months over the next few.

So, you start and time jumps a day, you’re checking in, and then another day, and then another. But then you wake up again, and realize it’s been a month and you’ve lost track of the days.

In your dreams, you’ve been running towards a pillar with carvings that look like a blurry outline of a face. But that pillar hasn’t gotten any closer.

Dreaming about dreams - that’s new. But, in reality, all of this is new. I don’t dream very often, if ever, in picture-perfect clarity. But recently, my nights and early mornings have been filled with images dancing in my head.

It was a regular day. I wasn’t expecting to drive to Philadelphia.

Why Philadelphia? Of all the places in the world, why Philadelphia? For some reasons, my parents lived there and refused to leave when a civil war and plague broke out. So I was on my way, driving from New York to Philadelphia to be with them. To convince Papa to leave. The air is eerie.

Cut to Philadelphia. Mumma and Papa are settled. Papa agrees to leave, but there are things to figure out. And so we wait. Bui and Phupheye stop by the house on their way out of the city. They are escaping and suggest we should too. Papa feels responsible for other things, so he stays behind and waits. Mumma and I push him along.

The air is green and red. Particles floating in the air. The imagery of electromagnetic waste is getting stronger by every minute and as it begins to get dark.

We decide we’re going to evacuate. But it’s now night and dark. The apartment is empty; we have taken care of “business.” We are in apartments very close to each other. Almost look inside the apartments. Similar to the ones in India, but with more steel and concrete. Like the houses along the high line.

The curfew is in place. And we wait. In the dark. Forever. In this wait. Not sure if we ever do evacuate.

And I wake up. It was a dream.

“Just the fact that you drove should have been your first indicator that this was a dream,” my dad said later when I told him this story.

He had a point. I am terrified of driving and maybe need a refresher driving course. But really, why did I think about driving? When you start thinking about the symbolism, Eastern and Western philosophies have varied interpretations. Driving to your family — heroic vs. a need for control.

But philosophies converge on one fact: dreams reveal hidden truths. A message from your subconscious or a divine intervention to signal some deeper truths.

In another one, I am on a project at work. Working with my favorite team of people. People I haven’t worked with in a while. I am doing a great job putting everything together. Orchestrating things.

I step away for lunch. “I am going to get lunch with my dad.”

I make eye contact as I pass him and say, “It’s good to be working together again.”

He nods, but I don’t hear a response.

I am not sure if the prep was days or months. I don’t know what happened before this incident.

But I leave for lunch. I am sitting in a park with Papa. We are talking. I get a phone call. “Carl,” it says. I am not going to pick up because I told them I am at lunch.

The phone stops ringing. And then Papa gets a phone call from a random number. But Papa, being the man he is, picks up the phone call.

“Hello?”

In broken Hindi, I hear a man on the other end say “Namaste uncle, mera naam Carl hai. Kya Megha vahan par hai? Kya hum usse baat kar sakte hai?”

He used the name Carl - the nickname I had given him for being moody, like the fog.

My dad is confused and says “Yes, she is here, what do you want? Kya chahiye?”

Instead of switching to English, he keeps going “Ussko batana tha ki usko vapsi ane ki zaroorat nahi hai, Hume uski madat nahi chahiye.”

My dad starts laughing. “Ok she doesn’t need you.”

Then passes me the phone. I take it shocked and upset. “Why would you call my dad?” Is the first thing I say.

“Because you wouldn’t pick up your phone.”

I get up and step away.

“What the fuck is this?”

“We don’t need to mix work and life. I got you off of this project.”

“Who said that was ok for you to do? This is life; work is a part of life. Why is that so hard for you?”

“Why do you always have to fight this?”

More words are exchanged in whispers as I pace near my father. “I have to go, we will talk when I get home.”

We cut the call. I go back to my father.

Jump cut, and I am at home. “Carl” is in my home.

We fight about what this all means. Why is this so hard? Words of frustration. A feeling of unrest. Unclear meaning and sentences. Things that don’t entirely make sense.

When I wake up from dreams, I don’t remember the play-by-play most of the time. But the feelings, hours after I’ve been awake, the feelings sit heavily on my chest like they are pressing the air out of my lungs, shaking each bone, tightening the muscles.

They feel so real, conversations like they actually happened. But no, it was in my head.

If it played out in my dreams, is it fantasy? An alternate reality? Will it not happen in real life?

This time, we are prepping for a farewell party.

A giant hallway conference room. My friends, actual people from my life that are in no way related to work are there. We’re thinking of what we should get him for his farewell.

I am quiet. The idea of a group gift feels wrong. I already had the book I was going to wrap tonight.

We cut to the event. He walks in with a gorgeous brunette and a 2-year-old kid in his arms. And it looks so perfect and right. No one could imagine it any other way.

He is so happy — he got another job, everything he wished for — a wife, a kid, travel, and a stable, well-paying job that allows him to build a home. I had looked him up on LinkedIn earlier and seen that he had worked in restaurants for a long time before this job. And now he is here, and soon he will be there, in another place.

We keep avoiding each other. My friends gave him the gift. I hold mine behind my back and step away, smiling, trying to hide the gift in a stairwell. But he finds me, like he always somehow does.

“You look happy,” I say. Pushing the gift in a stair near my head.

“Yes, so do you.” He pauses, as his eyes follow the movement of my hands. “And I am.” He smiles.

There is nothing more to say. We were nothing. A curiosity. A something that never was. It doesn’t hurt but we both acknowledge the tug because of the lack of clarity.

“So you’ve been traveling a bit before the new job?” I ask.

“Yes, a bit. But we’ve just been building a home and settling him down.” He looks down at the sleeping baby in his arms. I forgot about that.

“That’s great.” I smile.

“What about you? Many adventures, I’m sure.”

I feel old usually, but around him, I revert to being a schoolgirl. Shifting side-to-side.

“Yeah, I am going to Guatemala and then India and then Thailand.”

“Nice.” He nods.

There was nothing else left to say.

The brunette from earlier came to take the baby. And they seemed so natural, exchanging words and quiet smiles. College sweethearts. It was inevitable. Nothing could beat that familiarity and calmness.

“I need to go. It was good to see you and congratulations.” I say as I move past them, leaving the gift behind, hoping he’ll take it without me having to hand it to him.

“You don’t always have to run.”

That was the last thing as I pushed myself past and walked away.

And so I try to dream, every night, waiting to return to something. During the day I think about what this could all mean. How can it all have felt so real when none of it happened? How could I be on the brink of tears for many mornings?

When I was having these dreams, I thought the dreams may have been an outcome of the period between two eclipses. Maybe as Bhaiya had said, it was the result meeting an enlightened master.

Now that I am not dreaming every night and things are back to the way they were — I toss and turn, eventually go to bed, and then wake up — I am equally puzzled. Because they happened in quick succession - dreams of people I’ve met in the past, my friends sharing a studio space, my cousin getting married. They happened in such vivid detail with people and faces I recognize that it seemed like I was watching through a window into a parallel world. They have to be true - there were true elements in the words exchanged. If they weren’t, h If it had happened in an alternate life, then will it not happen in my current life? Is that how the things I can see in picture perfect clarity when I shut my eyes and think of a future will turn out to? If dreams are manifestations of our desires, how do you deal with changed dreams?

What is the subconscious trying to signal? Is that what humans are left wondering their entire life?